Telluride, CO
by nemo1934
Summary: "I was the last person ever to see Craig Tucker, and that was it: the very last time." The boys go on a skiing trip. Tweek x Craig  no lemons, kiddos.


**Dedicated to foodstamp, whose stories always rock my world.**

At the top of Audrey we rested for a while. Craig looked out at the sun-bleached snowcaps and scraped snow out of his gloves. Somehow he was breathing regularly. I lay back in the snow and struggled to catch my breath and stop my chest from heaving. Hiking had never been my thing, and oxygen deprivation had worsened the work, making just a few steps totally exhausting. Lying there I was completely useless. Craig passed me his water bottle, and I managed to sit up before sloshing down a few sloshes. After that I was too drained to lie back down, so I just sat and looked with Craig out at the mountains. Everything was still and white, except for the sky. Pillowy clouds floated across it, headed unhurriedly from one someplace to another.

No sound came to us from any direction. Although we'd seen some people on the long hike up here, all of them shirtless despite the snow, they'd passed us and were long gone from the peak now. We were at elevation 13,000 feet—somewhere around there. Craig laughed quietly, laughter's equivalent of a whisper, and then I felt him brushing snow out of my hair. He left his ungloved hand resting lightly on the back of my neck. I looked over at him.

After a minute he scooted around to check out the precipitous Audrey slope and got an eyeful of sky. He stood up and walked over the edge, then looked down. He seemed to mull things over.

Finally he said, "You ready?"

Our skis and poles we had tossed to one side. Still panting and lightheaded, wanting to ask for another minute of rest but embarrassed, I stooped to pick them up. I handed Craig his, and then looked with him over the ledge. Audrey was dotted with trees, tall, hazardous ones. The slope was so steep I hadn't even been able to see them from where I was sitting. It was also covered in moguls.

"All right, let's do this," he said.

* * *

On skis I'm a mess, so Craig got way ahead of me going down. The slope was not only steep but icy, and several times when I fell, one of my skis would come off while I slid farther down, and then I would have to hike back up to get it. Audrey had two parts. The first was mostly bald, except for those few dangerous pines; the second took you through the woods on a path that wasn't so steep but was incredibly narrow. By the time I was halfway down Part One, my legs were burning and Craig was waiting at the tree line, just a vague blur without my glasses, watching me make my arthritically slow way down.

"Jeez!" I kept saying, shifting my weight from one aching leg to another. At one point I shouted, "Just keep going!" But it was no use. No matter what I do, I'm a nuisance, I thought. What I really wanted to do was to put my hand on Craig's shoulder when I got down to where he was.

But before I reached the tree line he took off. I caught a glimpse of him angling expertly between two young growing pines, and then he was gone. That flash of him, the back of his coat, is etched into my mind.

I was the last person ever to see him, and that was it: the very last time.

* * *

Craig Tucker was one of those guys at my school who I never really talked to. You grow up with them, you hear about their accomplishments, their failings. But none of it ever really means anything to you. Seems like nothing about our lives really meshed. We ran with different people, made different grades, had different personalities and opinions. Before Telluride we just never had any occasion to talk to or even think about each other.

The Telluride trip was planned by the Marshes, so it was a big surprise when I got invited. Other than me and Craig, it was pretty much all of Stan's close friends: Kyle, Wendy, Kenny, etc. But Stan and I had bonded one rainy day when I jumped his car for him in the school parking lot. Going in I was afraid his buddies might shut me out, but of course they didn't. It turned out those guys were all really open to new people; Craig and I were repositioned sort of at the center of attention. I was able to create a totally new personality, and that was liberating. Suddenly I was funny, perceptive, bright. Me and Craig.

One reason things went so well at first was that I was in a real good place. If you were to make a graph of my feelings over the year you'd probably come out with something like a sine curve: up, down, up, down. That particular up was like any other. To be honest, although I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, I was sort of full of myself. The way I saw it, I was this super mature guy, very wise and selfless. Willing to listen to anything other people had to say, to erase myself from the picture.

That, of course, was just an illusion. A persona, useless like all the others, that disappeared when the going got tough.

* * *

One day our whole group was making its way down an icy black on the northern side of the mountain. Craig and I happened to strike up a conversation, and we went down the slope together, occasionally stopping so one of us could make himself clear. Some kids in the grade above ours had formed our school's first ever GSA in response to some violence that had happened earlier in the year. The club (because that's what it was, really, not an organization that took itself at all seriously) was new and stupidly controversial enough that being involved made you a novelty. There were hardly any openly gay kids at our school. Craig seemed interested in the whole thing.

I gave him my typical spiel. "At some point in every person's life," I said sagely, "there's a kind of coming to terms process. Coming to terms with your religion, gender, ethnicity, you know, whatever. Society has a role for everybody, and it takes people time and emotional energy to deal with that. Mostly people come to terms with these things when they're very young, like before they turn two. But coming to terms with your sexuality is totally different."

"Uh-huh."

"People generally realize they're gay or bi or whatever when they're about thirteen, once they've started to think they've got themselves figured out. It's like they've just finished furnishing a room with this nice stuff, and suddenly the floor drops out. I mean, it's an identity crisis, right? And it can take years to refurnish that room. Pardon the stupid analogy."

He seemed to understand exactly what I was saying.

We sat down toward the bottom of the slope. A bearded snowboarder roared past us holding a plastic bag of take-out from some restaurant at the top of the mountain. Some clouds drifted by, and a tiny animal nibbled on a nut at the edge of the woods. Up at that altitude everything goes slow except the people.

The chairlift back up was a two-seater that rode without mercy, very bumpy and very fast. There was no bar. Craig and I rode together. Getting on nearly busted our asses.

"So are you thinking about joining GSA?" I asked.

"Well, I'd like to," he said. "As an ally. But what I'm concerned about is, can you be involved anonymously? My parents more or less forbade any kind of involvement in it."

"Oh yeah? That sucks."

"No kidding."

"Well, I mean, yeah," I said. "Involvement can be totally anonymous. GSA would probably be in a lousy state if it demanded that all its members stand up and announce themselves. Like, we're not looking for martyrs."

That made him laugh. Then he said, "I just, well, I don't know. It's a weird thing. Forget it."

"You can be nobody if you wanna be," I said. "The first item on GSA's agenda is getting pizza for the meetings."

We swung our skis and I told him a story about how one time I had accidentally snapped a rented pair in two doing just what we were doing now. Then we talked about a teacher at our school who always wore a beret.

* * *

That night, or maybe it was the next night, the Oscars were broadcast on TV. That was the year "Up in the Air" had been in theaters, and George Clooney lost Best Actor to Jeff Bridges, who was very drunk during his speech and rambled too long about his daughters. George Clooney sat in the audience and glared. Miles away, everyone in our group sat in the guest bedroom on a springy pull-out bed, part of a big and abnormally lumpy couch, watching it all unfold on a tiny screen. I remember we laughed at one guy's pronunciation of Meryl Streep's name. _Maaril_, he said.

At one point Craig and I shared an iPod and listened to some David Bowie. Turned out our tastes were totally irreconcilable. Since we were all crammed onto the bed, Craig and I pressed up against each other, and casually I draped my arm over the back of the couch, almost touching his shoulders.

After everyone else had gone back to the living room, he and I stayed right there, watching the TV. There was a feeling like if either of us said anything or moved, it would break the spell, and I'd have to remove my arm. The Oscars were wrapping up, but we might as well have been watching some terrible local band wail on public access. We were completely focused on each other, and he couldn't stop grinning.

* * *

When I emerged from the woods at the end of Audrey, Craig was nowhere to be seen. The slope ended in a parting of trees which opened on a double green run that snaked around the perimeter of the mountain. All around me were little kids in bright jackets. They pizza pied as they descended a tiny hill, doubting the skis under their feet. More experienced kids raced by, shouting. They were probably better skiers than I was. Winded, I sat down, congratulating myself on just being alive. I was thinking about taking off my skis, maybe going back to the apartment in Mountain Village and having some tea or hot chocolate. I could sit on the back porch and watch skiers go by on the run below. But I knew that wouldn't be any fun without Craig. It'd be nice to let my hand touch the back of his hand between two chairs, beneath the window, where no one could see us.

Where had he gone to?

* * *

The cops kept me three days longer than anyone else. After the other guys had been sent home, it was just me and Mr. Marsh in the apartment. The place seemed too big. Mrs. Marsh called all the time to check on Craig's status, and once a day she would talk to me, say something reassuring. Stan and the others were supportive of me, but I always detected a note of suspicion in their voices when they would ask me about "what went on" at the top of the mountain. "Nothing went on," I would answer truthfully. But you gotta admit—two guys alone at the top of a mountain, and the experienced skier vanishes mysteriously. Pretty suspicious. The cops thought the same thing.

In the mornings Mr. Marsh would make us scrambled eggs or an omelette or something, and while we were eating the sun would come up and illuminate the cluttered nook. Unlike Mrs. Marsh, he seemed removed from the whole situation. Like he was on some other planet. He did most of the talking for the two of us, but it was always about irrelevant stuff, like sports or self-esteem. Which isn't to say that we didn't get along. Just the opposite: we bonded quite a bit, those three days.

After breakfast we would ride the gondola into town and I would spend much of the day at the Telluride police department. Mr. Marsh would go see a movie and then return to the house to make phone calls. He had work to do.

Officer Richardson, the head guy on my case, was always carrying this manila folder which seemed to contain endless information about me. Maybe more information than I myself knew or could remember. They spent a few days studying the folder and questioning me, calling my parents and talking to teachers at South Park High. "Tweek Tweekers," he would say around a cinnamon-flavored toothpick. "That's got to be some sort of mistake, right?" He invariably began by making fun of my name. Later, when he got tired of hearing about my boring past or the missing boy, he would make small talk about square-toed shoes, how the only place you could get them nowadays was in "big cities, like New York or Denver." "Yep," he said to me in the end. "You're about as clean as the fresh driven snow."

At night Mr. Marsh and I would get a pizza and listen to music. He was a big Elvis fan. Presley, not Costello. After he went to bed there was nobody to talk to, and I got pretty lonely. By midnight all the lights were out. I slept in the bed opposite Craig's, always hoping to hear his feet on the stairs and feel him crawl in next to me in the middle of the night.

In the end they never found Craig. Everyone back home was torn up. But of course no one could ever link me to his disappearance. It was as though God had reached down and plucked him off the Earth. Perhaps joined him with another situation in another state. He didn't seem like the kind of guy to vanish and attempt to furnish a new life for himself, even if he had had the means to try. The truth is, no one knows what happened, and probably no one ever will. I've stopped wondering about it.

There are a lot of nice memories from our two peaceful days together stored up in my head, enough to take up two or three useless pages. Who knows if they would stick in my mind like this if our relationship hadn't been cut so short. They might've faded into the kind of blurry landscape you see from the window of a fast-moving car. Instead each memory is precise and distinct. Anyway, to save space and also your time, I'll just write about one.

I was skiing along lazily after a difficult double blue that had worn out my legs, and Craig skied up beside me. He was going faster than I was, and smiling he offered me his pole, thinking he might pull me along with him. Of course when I grabbed it it just slowed both of us down. But we just started laughing and tried to push ourselves the rest of the way until we found a downhill spot and started sliding again. I stopped looking at where I was going, and kept my eyes on him. I don't know what it was, but just for that moment he was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. He turned and saw me, raised his eyebrows as if waiting for a question.

At the bottom of the run, we got a bite to eat and talked about homosexuality in some secluded corner of the restaurant. It was all we ever found we had in common.


End file.
